Post by garret on Jul 27, 2010 22:02:05 GMT -7
THE HANDLER
NAME: Garret Michael Sykes
NICKNAME: N/A
CLASSIFICATION: Human with metal empathy/manipulation.
GENDER: Male!
AGE & BIRTHDAY: April 24, 28 years old.
APPEARANCE: Garret is a fairly thin, sallow man, much too tall seemingly, for his weight. Weighing in at only 180 lbs and being 6'4" isn't usually a healthy combination. Pale and somewhat wan looking, Garret's face is almost always framed by a thick goatee and stubbly-looking beard. A fuzzy mop of ashen-brown hair sits atop his head, looking rather too-oft shampooed. He has a rather large nose, seeming to jut out of his face almost like the beak of a bird-of-prey. Two hazel eyes are set above this protruding appendage.
Garret isn't particularly muscular or skinny looking, just pretty average. He usually has a pensive look on his face, his brow has deep furrows on it from it being scrunched up in frustration/concentration most of the time. His fingers are long and slender, a pianists' hands at first glance. However, when one looks closer, they would see that a multitude of calluses cover his hands.
ATTIRE: Off-duty, Garret usually wears a rumpled up Oxford shirt, over which goes a black blazer. A pair of slightly faded jeans cover brown no-lace loafers. He wears a grey wool driver's cap on his head, matting his hair down, getting it in his eyes.
On-duty, it's about the same attire, except the shirt is ironed and pressed, and the pants are replaced by a pair of black slacks. Garret dons black sunglasses as an affectation, in order to look a bit more professional.
PLAY BY: Adrien Brody
THE CREATION
NAME: Limelight
POWER LIST:
Metal manipulation (kind of, I'll get into more detail later.)
OOC: These powers may seem like quite a bit to smash into one character, but I am humbly asking you to trust my RP'ing ability in order not to use them to an extent that would be considered overpowered.
DETAILED POWER:
Metal Manipulation (I'm kind of stealing this from a series of books, so please bear with me.): For some inexplicable reason, by ingesting certain metals (in a process he refers to as "burning"), Garret can draw certain strengths from them. Every metal can also be "flared", for a brief expenditure of immense power, however, flaring metals too often absolutely destroys the human body, this metal manipulation pushing the body further than it was meant to go, and flaring pushing it even further.
Pewter: This is the external physical metal, enhancing strength, durability, speed, and reflex time. Again, the enhancement depends on how strongly he burns the metal. Pewter is also the most draining of the metals, the enhancement taking a toll on his body quickly, if too much is used too quickly or for a long enough amount of time, exhaustion is quick to set in. Meaning that one could take a bullet to the chest while burning pewter, only to die when it is shut off due to the sudden loss of bodily strength.
Iron: The internal metal manipulation metal, Iron allows Garret to pull metallic objects towards him. He only can pull them in a straight line towards him, and physics apply completely, meaning that if the object is heavier than he is or is grounded, he would fly towards it. Being used only in short bursts, Iron can last for a rather large amount of time, determined by the strength of the pulls.
Steel: The external metal manipulation metal, Steel allows Garret to push metallic objects away from him. He only can push them in a straight line away from him, and physics apply completely, meaning that if the object is heavier than he is or is well grounded, he would fly away from the object. Can be used in either short bursts or for an extended amount of time, extending the time makes the metal burn out extremely quickly.
THE POTENTIAL
ALIGNMENT/OCCUPATION: BPRD field agent/language expert
WEAPONS: Garret usually carries around three or four vials of metal flakes suspended in an alcohol solution, which serve as his weapons. However, he also wields a switchblade and is fairly proficient with small handguns. "Fairly" meaning that he knows how to shoot one, but that's about it. He has recently started using a medieval-styled longsword, his ability to push the metal making up for his complete lack of skill while using the weapon.
PERSONALITY: Garret doesn't take much seriously, to be honest. Constantly with a witty remark or some off-color joke on his lips, he can be a bit grating when not trying to impress or smooth over things. Quick to both laughter and anger, Garret shows his emotions as he feels them, bottling nothing up. He is also a bit of a romantic around women, polite at all times, holds doors open, knows which fork to eat with first, the works. Garret loves being the center of attention, showing off (and sometimes screwing up in the process) often. However, he isn't so crass as to try to steal the spotlight from someone else or jeopardize a mission to look more impressive, but he cuts it close sometimes.
Garret dislikes people who are too serious, too mopey, or too "normal". Though in the BPRD, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. He carries exactly $1.00 in change around in his pocket at all times, both as a good luck charm as a practical weapon for steelpushes. He both hates and loves being stared at, he dislikes being considered a freak, but loves the attention garnered by it, being one-of-a-kind.
He has a bit of a sarcastic streak, and makes use of a worldly wit to deal with any problems in the department. With anyone but those he knows best, Garret has a lot of trouble speaking his mind, usually going the easy route and just laughing things off.
SKILLS: Garret is a bit of a language-savant, only requiring months of cultural immersion to become nearly fluent in a language easily pronounceable by the human tongue. He is fluent in English, Chinese, and the romantic languages. He can carry on a somewhat broken conversation in German, Russian, Latin, and Thai. He is a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, specializing in small piercing weapons, fueled by his pewter-enhanced speed and strength. He knows his way around computers, and can fix some non-complicated electronic equipment (even though his usual method is just to hit it).
STRENGTHS: The most noticeable thing about Garret is his personality. He can dominate a room seemingly without trying, his presence almost making him larger-than-life, laughing harder, smiling wider, and feeling everything more than everyone else. He loves conversation, if it's centered on something he finds interesting, and is always engaging. Garret can make nearly anything interesting, from rocket science to the state of the papaya farming industry. His reflexes are top-notch, needing to be as his steelpushing (the preferred way to get around for him), requires him to react extremely quickly to outside stimuli.
WEAKNESSES: Garret is impulsive, often taking the easiest way out of whatever situation he's in. His personality and ease of getting to know people has made him rather headstrong, believing that he can get through nearly any situation through sheer force of personality. However, when this fails, he believes that the only course of action is, well...action. Garret is a bit self-centered, believing that no one can handle a situation quite as well has he can, and can ruin a potential situation by choosing action when a different approach was needed.
His powers making him nearly immune to the hostile effects of projectile metallic objects, Garret regards ranged combat somewhat unfavorably. This can make him get in the way of other operatives when in a firefight. Most of these are the exception, not the rule, as Garret would hardly be allowed to go on high-risk assignments if this was his standard method of operation.
THE STORY
HISTORY: Garret had a rather normal childhood, born in a suburban hospital in northern Illinois on April 24, 31 years prior to present day to a certain Bennet and Jean Sykes. Up until he was around six or seven years old, nothing special happened in Garret's life. Just the normal stuff, learning how to walk, talk, read, and write taking up most of his time. However, at the age of seven, he started becoming noticeably...odder. Always a slightly built child, when angered or frustrated (under the effects of any extremely strong emotion or trauma, really), he would become terrifyingly strong for his size, able to injure an adult human during a tantrum. These tantrums only lasted for a few seconds, however, before Garret would collapse from exhaustion. This posed a problem. What to do with a child who scares both his parents and himself? The answer Bennet and Jean came up with? Put him in a small private school and get therapy.
For the most part, this was the correct answer. Putting him in therapy made him more docile, becoming exceedingly well-behaved for his age, to the extent that other people would comment on his status and ask if he was sick or something was wrong. Still, though, his oddities couldn't be hidden for very long. Soon, Garret noticed that, by concentrating, he could see blue lines connecting his body to all sorts of metallic objects, and by pushing, he could move them slightly before the lines vanished. By this time, the "odd child" was becoming known through the block and surrounding area, causing other families to give the Sykes' a wide berth.
When Garret was 10 years of age, two men came to the door. A man dressed in the stereotypical black suit and sunglasses/earpiece of the FBI. He informed Garret's parents that he was a burgeoning member of a society that specialized in "unique" abilities, and that they had reason to believe that Garret was able to use his mind to move objects around. When they tested him, however, they found that his power was so slight, so negligible, that he would be allowed to live a normal life, if instructed to keep his minuscule powers under wraps. This is when Garret's parents informed them about his ridiculously strong tantrums that he used to throw. It seemed to throw the agent for a loop, and he informed Garret's parents that he would have to be taken to a lab/hospital for physical testing. Garret suffered through an entire year of extensive testing in what he would come to know as the BPRD labs.
The tests came up with something not seen before, what was assumed to be the usual power of extraordinary strength turned out to be an ability to draw strength from certain metals. It seemed that trace metals in food/water/silverware were powering Garret's abilities for the past 11 years. The three metals were Pewter, which controlled his physical prowess, and Iron and Steel, which controlled his ability to push/pull metal. For Garret's family, this was a huge discovery. They were instructed to have him live a normal life until he was 18, old enough to join the bureau, or it was implied that he could be made to "not be a problem anymore". Both Garret and his family did not like the sound of the second option, so they opted for the first.
He was homeschooled through 8th grade (no doubt contributing to his self-centeredness) and was subsequently allowed to go to a public high school, however, his diet and comings-and-goings were carefully monitored, to make sure that he didn't get more than a baseline amount of metals into his system, often involving several painful tests a week. Like a normal kid, he made friends, had his heart broken, failed a class or two, was grounded, got over it, and proceeded to make his way through the gauntlet of high school.
Graduation day. After the customary tossing-up-of-caps, Garret became nervous, and found himself making good-byes to friends that had no idea that he'd be leaving for parts unknown. It wasn't long before the BPRD came into contact with him. Being an impulsive teenager, Garret accepted the invitation with open arms. After a teary farewell to his family, he left with another man in a black suit to a waste-processing plant somewhere in Jersey. Except it wasn't a waste-processing plant at all.
It was the place of Garret's dreams, all people (and some not-people) like him, working together against a common foe, keeping signs of the supernatural away from the general populace. For the next 10 years, Garret worked with many members of odd species and people with powers that were far, far different than his own. Now, freshly back from an assignment in the People's Republic of China, Garret is ready to start working against the enigmatic Prince Nuada and his somewhat-nefarious schemes against the people of the BPRD.
